Intellectual properties are becoming more and more central to the world economy. In an information economy, discrete or aggregate values are placed on intellectual properties, and the markets for general or specific applications of these properties are huge. For example, the software industry, which has embodiments of intellectual properties in software products and services, and representations of property rights in licenses, legal contracts and agreements, copyrights, trademarks and patents, currently has annual sales rates of over $135 billion per year.
Increasingly, the Internet (or World Wide Web) is the medium of transmission of intellectual properties such as software products and the like. The Internet uses the Internet Protocol to frame, route, and reassemble digital messages. The transaction of intellectual property is a general transfer of data and data communications over the Internet; intellectual property such as software is simply treated as a bit stream in Internet Protocol. On top of the Internet Protocol are specialized transport layer services, such as HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) or SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). Within these, many messages are encoded in markup languages such as XML (Extensible Markup Language), the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) meta-markup language based on Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), and preferably one of the latest members of the of the SGML family.
With regard to the protection of intellectual property, the prior art takes a defensive posture that is focused on guarding the intellectual property against unauthorized access, duplication and use. Limitations are placed on the use and distribution of a piece of intellectual property, and various means are used to attempt to enforce these limitations. Oftentimes, the limitations can be easily circumvented, and so enforcement can be difficult, and therefore is mostly ineffective.
In addition, while in some cases the prior art may take advantage of the Internet for delivery of intellectual property such as software, the prior art is still encumbered by more traditional mechanisms for conducting the legal and commercial aspects of intellectual property transactions. For example, license agreements and the like must be negotiated, written, reviewed and approved. These more traditional mechanisms can cause delay in the delivery and use of the intellectual property by a purchaser or licensee, and delay in the receipt of payments or royalties due to a seller or licensor.
Recently, some software vendors have developed software products that are stored on floppy disks and/or stored on computer disks that include standard licensing terms that are displayed during the installation process. The floppy disk or the computer disk is inserted into the user's computer and the user initiates the installation process. During the installation process, a copy of a standard licensing agreement is displayed. The user must choose to accept the license terms to continue the installation process. If the user does not accept the license terms, the user cannot install the software product. This creates a problem for users who require non-standard licensing terms. These users must directly contact the vendor of the software product and conduct license negotiations individually. This is expensive and time consuming for both the user and for the vendor of the software product.
Accordingly, what is needed is a method and/or system that can be used to control the assignment of intellectual property that overcomes the problems discussed above. What is also needed is a method and/or system that satisfies the above need and that can accommodate commonly-accepted legal and financial standards and systems. The present invention provides a novel solution to the above needs.
These and other objects and advantages of the present invention will become obvious to those of ordinary skill in the art after having read the following detailed description of the preferred embodiments that are illustrated in the various drawing figures.